Devil's Bargain

“You, too?” he murmured.

“Yes. Me, too. I’m just as tired as she is of the cloak-and-dagger, and I’d be willing to bet I’m just all-around more tired, period. Tell us, or get out and take your red envelopes with you.” Lucia couldn’t possibly have a clue what they were arguing about, but you’d never have known it from the self-possession she displayed—then again, hell, for all Jazz knew, Lucia had the apartment wired for sound and vision. Maybe she knew everything.

Maybe she always did.

Borden looked from one of them to the other, wordlessly, and Jazz didn’t blink. Neither, so far as she could tell, did Lucia.

“I need to make a phone call,” he said.

“Then dial,” Lucia said softly. “Before we pick up the phone and tell Detective Stewart everything we know about Gabriel, Pike & Laskins. You put my partner in a compromising position, Mr. Borden. I don’t think I like that very much. Make amends.”

He visibly swallowed. Jazz might have felt sorry for him, except the fierce gratitude and pride she was feeling for Lucia crowded all of that out.

He reached in his pocket and retrieved his cell phone, and dialed. “Yeah,” he said slowly. “It’s Borden. I need to take Callender and Garza to the next level.”

Silence. His eyes fixed on the newspaper lying folded on the table. The picture of Wendy Blankenship, who hadn’t survived the night that Jazz Callender barely remembered after the blur of drinks.

“Yes,” he said. “I understand.” He hung up and looked at each of them in turn, Jazz last. His eyes were asking her for something, but she couldn’t understand what it was, and she wasn’t in the mood to grant him any favors anyway. “We need to go downstairs,” he said. “Right now.”

“I just got off a plane,” Lucia said. “Mind if I change clothes first?”

“Actually, I do,” he said. “There’s a car waiting.”

“What?” For the first time, Jazz actually saw Lucia thrown off her stride. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Borden didn’t answer. Jazz, after a few unmoving seconds, answered for him.

“They knew,” she said. “They had to know all of this before it happened. Why else would they have a car here, now?”

“That’s insane,” Lucia said flatly.

“Yes,” she agreed. “Like hiring two people who don’t know each other. Like paying them to set up a detective agency and carry out assignments that don’t have any purpose. That’s insane, too. Remember?”

Lucia stared at her, a frown grooved over her eyebrows, a light in her eyes that Jazz hadn’t seen before. Wary. Mistrustful.

“It’s crazy,” she repeated slowly.

“Yeah,” Jazz agreed. “My point exactly.” She turned to Borden. “Let’s go see the wizard, Tin Man.”

It wasn’t just a car downstairs, it was a limousine. A big, black stretch limo, with tinted windows and a uniformed chauffeur who looked vaguely familiar. Jazz blinked at the sight of him—it was odd, seeing a stretch limo and a liveried driver on the streets of Kansas City—but it was Lucia who said, “We’ve met you before.”

The driver doffed his cap and nodded with military precision. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, and Jazz remembered. Same driver from New York City, from the visit to the Gabriel, Pike & Laskins offices, only more formally dressed and captaining a bigger land yacht. He opened the back door and handed Lucia inside, then reached for Jazz, who avoided him and climbed in on her own.

Milo Laskins, Borden’s boss, was the sole occupant of the car. He was dressed in another natty suit, this one charcoal-gray, with a navy tie and a diamond stickpin.

“Ms. Garza. Ms. Callender.” Laskins offered them a gentlemanly nod. “I understand you have questions. That’s perfectly reasonable. I’m authorized to answer them.”

Jazz had been prepared to argue, but his easy, courteous ma

“That’s simpler than you might think,” Laskins said, and raised thick eyebrows. “I’m just like you. I’m an Actor.”

Jazz heard the capital A. Didn’t understand what it meant, but she heard the emphasis.

He tapped the thick, tinted divider behind him. The limo pulled into traffic, smooth as silk. Jazz fisted her hands. She felt helpless, moving out of control.

“Which means what, exactly?” Lucia asked. “Conspiracy theory di

“I will give you a very simple overview of what we—or, more properly, the Cross Society—now know about the world, Ms. Garza. There are two kinds of people in it.”

“Only two?” Lucia murmured, sounding amused.

“For our purposes, yes. There are Actors and Chorus. At any given time on this planet, out of the billions of human lives being lived, only a handful—about ten thousand, all together—are doing anything that really matters on a larger scale. These are people we term Actors. Everyone else…” Laskins made a languid, elegant motion with one hand. “Chorus. Extras, if you will. It isn’t the same ten thousand from moment to moment, understand. Almost every life on Earth will experience at least one decision, one event in their life that has large ripples of consequence—almost everyone moves from Chorus to Actor once in their lives. But it turns out, rather unexpectedly, that once you begin to analyze the world in this ma

“I don’t understand,” Lucia said. She did sound interested, though Jazz had ceased to have any investment somewhere around the Actor/Chorus explanation, which was a load of horseshit; she was waiting for Laskins to stop spi

Unexpectedly, Laskins focused his gaze on her.

“Do you?”

“Afraid not,” she said, and shrugged. He sighed.

“Have you ever heard the old adage, nothing succeeds like success? Or, it takes money to make money? They share a common theme. The more you have of one thing, the natural tendency is that similar things attract.”

“I have no idea what the hell you’re saying,” Jazz said. “Can we move on to the part where you tell me why you had me let a woman die last night? Because that’s the part I’m really fascinated about.”

Laskins’s smile vanished. He looked tired and old and, suddenly, unhappy. “I wish I could explain it to you in a way that made sense. I can’t, not really, but I’ll try.

“Certain people are never Chorus in this life, Jasmine. They are, quite simply, always Actors. Everything they do ripples and has consequences, even the smallest thing. They are rare, these…Leads. We have identified perhaps a hundred of them. The woman that you were asked to follow was a Lead, and you were there to counter a move by the opposition. It was the right move, but it simply failed.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“We put you in place to save her life.”

The limo made a right turn. Jazz glanced out the windows, half-claustrophobic, and saw that they were on the back side of the office building.

Circling the block.

She took a deep breath. “Hate to break it to you, but it didn’t work.”

“Yes,” Laskins said quietly. “I’d like to tell you that it was a foolproof system. It doesn’t always work out.”

“Doesn’t always work out?” Jazz repeated hotly. “She’s dead! If she’s so damn important and you knew she was in danger, why didn’t you use one of those—those Actors or Leads or whatever to protect her?”

Laskins leaned forward, fixed her with a look, and said, very softly, “We did.”

Borden sucked in a breath. Jazz looked sharply at him, but he didn’t say anything. He avoided her eyes.

“Are you telling me that I’m a—whatever?”

“Yes. A Lead. Both of you are. That’s why we chose you. That’s why we’ve financed you, and we’ve put you in a position to do things on our behalf. Because you can. Because you must.”